A Tale of Two Friends

Cancer sucks.

Let me tell you about two friends of mine, Raul and Michael.

Raul is a good man working and supporting his family. Four sons and a couple of grandsons. He was at work and took a fall for no reason, headaches and dizziness led to a diagnosis of a brain tumor. Completely inoperable but Chemo and radiation to treat it. His doctors have given him 1 to 3 years. That was over a year ago. He will not “just stop” one day but will likely fade and devolve slowly. He has suffered badly since, and last month started bleeding from his nose with no stopping only to start bleeding from the roof of his mouth when they got his nose to stop. Last time I saw him was in the hospital waiting for surgery, to give his wife a break. It was one of the most gruesome things I have seen (and I’ve seen a lot) three surgeries in the last month. He is having trouble swallowing and his wife (God bless her) is cutting his food into small bites as he does not want puréed food. His doctors wanted to install a colostomy bag, after sitting down with his doctor to go over the procedure and care of the bag, he pats his wife on the knee and says “I’m not doing this, not to you and not to the family”

He is terminal, he can pass with a colostomy bag and eating baby food every day or he can pass a few months earlier as a man. They have pretty much closed the doors to visitors and his sister in law and wife are there. His sons rotate through and he has gotten to hold his first granddaughter. Doctors have given him six months.

We are waiting.

 

Now Michael was a great friend of ours. Best man at our wedding, a whole mess of kids and grandkids. A few years older than I, he was a retired mail carrier, Vietnam vet, wonderful man. He is the first person (other than me) to address Mercy as “Mercy” everybody else was still calling her Mya after the adoption. When I told him this, he looked at Mercy and said. “That’s your name isn’t it?” And she gave him a typical 5 year old “Yup” so he tells her “Then that what I’ll call you”…….she has loved him ever since

he and his wife had a home here and another in Florida. Living the “snowbird” life. While on the way back home to Indiana, Michael started to hiccup. At first funny then worrisome, then alarming, so they stopped at a hospital along the way. After a battery of test, and more blood tests, then x-rays, then MRI, then CT scan…..stage 4 liver cancer. Michael had no symptoms or warning and was in very good shape (you don’t walk 20 miles a day for 30 years for nothing) After returning home and consulting specialists he had surgery to remove a good part of his liver (did you know that a liver grows back, amazing) Chemo and all the other obvious treatments didn’t work and Michael started to waste away very quickly. They were changing his medication numerous times a week  when he finally told the doctor “you’re going to tell us when we can stop this, right?” And the doctor quietly said that they can stop now as it was not accomplishing anything. Michael wasted away and passed in two months from diagnosis to death. He had changed so drastically that he decided to be cremated as he didn’t want family and friends looking at him afterwords, but to remember him as he was. The service was covered with pictures and notes.

Both of these men had enough time, thankfully, to make all the arrangements and get their estates in order. Michael found a way to get to his lawyers office without his wife knowing and made on of the shortest wills in history. “My wife gets everything”

Which way is best? I don’t know. Michael was here and gone very quickly and the pain is short and hot. Raul is fading and his systems are collapsing slowly. Grinding on the family and friends over a long period of time. Difficult and prolonged.

Michael was a shock, Raul is a tragedy.

The lovely wife and I have had a lot of discussions during this time. I have told her that I would go on a milk shake and instant breakfast diet before she is going to purée my food. And she has said that she would never want a colostomy bag just for a few more months. We are big believers in prearrangement of funerals.

Talk to your wife/husband/family.

 

Another murderous AR-15

Another school shooting, in Florida this time.

How can we allow that evil AR15 to kill our children.
We need to ban that evil AR15
We need to sentence that AR15 to life without parole.
Give that evil AR15 bread and water in solitary for life at hard labor.
No super duper extreme high capacity magazine clips visitation.
The mind control attributes of the evil AR15 must be nullified by placing a tin foil cover over the barrel thing that goes up.
Take….the….sights….away

Or we could provide our larger schools with security. Not just for shootings, there are many fights and teachers beaten and stabbed. There have been numerous sexual assaults in our schools.
The one tax increase I would support is to provide security at our schools.

I understand that the football coach who was killed was also the security guard for the school…..the unarmed security guard.

Lets change that. And we will see fewer deaths and much faster ending to these shootings.

 

We cannot have an honest conversation about guns laws until we have an……honest…..conversation about gun laws.

When the gun banning side stops manipulating numbers, slanting stories, and outright lying in order to fundraise or push a political agenda for votes.
When they concede the right to self defense and the reality that there are possibly 600 million firearms in this country and you can never confiscate them all.
When the see that criminals, by definition, will not obey laws.

Then we can have an honest, adult conversation about gun laws.

I don’t see that happening

Presidential portraits

A long history of Presidential portraits.

very proper and statesman like. Men to admire and immulate. Here are a few, in no particular order.

Truman

Eisenhower

Reagan

JFK

Carter

Teddy Roosevelt

 

and for your viewing pleasure

Obama

as they used to sing on Sesame Street

“one of these is not like the others”

(and not because of race, damn shame I have to add that)

 

 

Turns out we have all been dead for years

Michael Bastasch at The Daily Caller has researched the global destruction  predictions for the last thirty years.

http://dailycaller.com/2017/11/25/after-30-years-alarmists-are-still-predicting-a-global-warming-apocalypse/

For at least three decades scientists and environmental activists have been warning that the world is on the verge of a global warming “apocalypse” that will flood coastal cities, tear up roads and bridges with mega-storms and bring widespread famine and misery to much of the world.

The only solution, they say, is to rid the world of fossil fuels — coal, natural gas and oil — that serve as the pillars of modern society. Only quick, decisive global action can avert the worst effects of manmade climate change, warn international bodies like the United Nations, who say we only have decades left — or even less!

Of course, human civilization has not collapsed, despite decades of predictions that we only have years left to avert disaster. Ten years ago, the U.N. predicted we only had “as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C or more.”

This failed prediction, however, has not stopped the U.N. and others from issuing more apocalyptic statements.

To celebrate nearly three decades of dire predictions, The Daily Caller News Foundation put together this list of some of the most severe doomsday prophecies made by scientists, activists and politicians:

1. Apocalyptic warnings on repeat

A group of 1,700 scientists and experts signed a letter 25 years ago warning of massive ecological and societal collapse if nothing was done to curb overpopulation, pollution and, ultimately, the capitalist society in which we live today.

The Union of Concerned Scientists put out a second letter earlier this year, once again warning of the dire consequences of global warming and other alleged ecological ills. Now numbering 15,000, the group warns “soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out.”

“We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only home,” the scientists and experts warned.

It’s a terrifying warning — if you ignore the fact that none of their 1992 warning has come to fruition.

2. The planet will be “uninhabitable” by the end of the century

New York Magazine writer David Wallace-Wells published a 7,000-word article claiming global warming could make Earth “uninhabitable” by “the end of this century.”

Wallace-Wells’s article warned of terrors, like “Heat Death,” “Climate Plagues,” “Permanent Economic Collapse” and “Poisoned Oceans.”

“Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century,” Wallace-Wells wrote.

3. Prince Charles’s global warming deadline passed…and nothing happened

Prince Charles famously warned in July 2009 that humanity had only 96 months to save the world from “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.” That deadline has passed, and the prince has not issued an update to when the world needs to be saved.

Though the recently-released “Paradise Papers” show Charles lobbied U.K. lawmakers to enact policies that benefited his estate’s investment in a Bermuda company that does sustainable forestry. So, there’s that.

4. ‘Ice Apocalypse’ Now

Liberal writer and climate scientist Eric Holthaus claimed manmade global warming would set off the “ice apocalypse” at a pace “too quickly for humanity to adapt.”

Holthaus warned the wholesale collapse of two Antarctic glaciers — Pine Island and Thwaites — could happen sooner than previously believed, resulting in “flooding coastal cities and creating hundreds of millions of climate refugees.” Sounds terrible, but his conclusions aren’t really backed up by the science.

“I think his article is too pessimistic: that it overstates the possibility of disaster. Too soon, too certain,” Tamsin Edwards, a scientist who’s studied Antarctica, wrote in The Guardian about Holthaus’s article.

5. 2015 is the ‘last effective opportunity’ to stop catastrophic warming

World leaders meeting at the Vatican issued a statement saying that 2015 was the “last effective opportunity to negotiate arrangements that keep human-induced warming below 2-degrees [Celsius].”

Pope Francis wants to weigh in on global warming, and is expected to issue an encyclical saying basically the same thing. Francis reiterated that 2015 is the last chance to stop massive warming.

But what he should really say is that the U.N. conference is the “last” chance to cut a deal to stem global warming…since last year when the U.N. said basically the same thing about 2014’s climate summit.

6. France’s foreign minister said we only have “500 days” to stop “climate chaos”

When Laurent Fabius met with Secretary of State John Kerry on May 13, 2014 to talk about world issues he said “we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos.”

Ironically at the time of Fabius’ comments, the U.N. had scheduled a climate summit to meet in Paris in December 2015 — some 565 days after his remarks. Looks like the U.N. is 65 days too late to save the world.

7. Former President Barack Obama is the last chance to stop global warming

When Obama made the campaign promise to “slow the rise of the oceans,” some environmentalists may have taken him quite literally.

The United Nations Foundation President Tim Wirth told Climatewire in 2012 that Obama’s second term was “the last window of opportunity” to impose policies to restrict fossil fuel use. Wirth said it’s “the last chance we have to get anything approaching 2 degrees Centigrade,” adding that if “we don’t do it now, we are committing the world to a drastically different place.”

Even before that, then-National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center head James Hansen warned in 2009 that Obama only “has four years to save Earth.”

8. Remember when we had “hours” to stop global warming?

World leaders met in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2009 to potentially hash out another climate treaty. That same year, the head of Canada’s Green Party wrote that there was only “hours” left to stop global warming.

“We have hours to act to avert a slow-motion tsunami that could destroy civilization as we know it,” Elizabeth May, leader of the Greens in Canada, wrote in 2009. “Earth has a long time. Humanity does not. We need to act urgently. We no longer have decades; we have hours. We mark that in Earth Hour on Saturday.”

9. United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown said there was only 50 days left to save Earth

The year 2009 was a bad time for global warming predictions. That year Brown warned there was only “50 days to save the world from global warming,” the BBC reported. According to Brown there was “no plan B.”

Brown has been booted out of office since then.

10. The U.N.’s top climate scientist said in 2007 we only had four years to save the world

Rajendra Pachauri, the former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2007 that if “there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.”

“What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment,” he said.

Well, it’s 2017 and no new U.N. climate treaty has been presented. The only thing that’s changed since then is that Pachauri was forced to resign earlier this year amid accusations he sexually harassed multiple female coworkers.

11. Environmentalists warned in 2002 the world had a decade to go green

Environmentalist write George Monbiot wrote in the UK Guardian that within “as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world’s animals or it continues to feed the world’s people. It cannot do both.”

About 930 million people around the world were undernourished in 2002, according to U.N. data. By 2014, that number shrank to 805 million. Sorry, Monbiot.

12. Global warming apocalypse 1980s edition

The U.N. was already claiming in the late 1980s that the world had only a decade to solve global warming or face the consequences.

The San Jose Mercury News reported June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”

That prediction didn’t come true 17 years ago, and the U.N. is sounding the same alarm today.

I am old enough to remember they coming ice age in the seventies. My home was to be under two miles of ice by the year 2000. And interestingly enough the solution to the coming global ice age is the same solution to the current global warming/climate change.

Mercysdad

 

I knew it, I just knew it

Hat tip to Bayou Renaissance Man:

Tongue in cheek, here’s one for the conspiracy theorists

Received via e-mail:

Is this a coincidence?

The year was 1947. Some of you will recall that on July 8, 1947, 70 years ago, numerous witnesses claim that an Unidentified Flying Object, (UFO), with five aliens aboard, crashed onto a sheep and mule ranch just outside Roswell, New Mexico.

This is a well-known incident that many say has long been covered-up by the U.S. Air Force, as well as other Federal Agencies and Organizations.

However, what you may NOT known is that in the month of April, year 1948, nine months after the historic day, the following people were born:

Barack Obama Sr.
Albert A. Gore Jr.
Hillary Rodham
William J. Clinton
John F. Kerry
Howard Dean
Nancy Pelosi
Dianne Feinstein
Charles E. Schumer
Barbara Boxer
Joe Biden

This is the obvious consequence of aliens breeding with sheep and jack-asses.

I truly hope this bit of information clears up a lot of things for you. It certainly did for me.

And now you can stop wondering why they support the bill to help Illegal Aliens.

I’m not going to take the time and lookup all those birthdates…but it makes sense doesn’t it?

https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2017/11/tongue-in-cheek-heres-one-for.html

Professional? Athletes

i haven’t commented much on the NFL protests. But let’s look at it from an outside perspective.

the players in the NFL are professional athletes. Let’s look at the professional  emphasis for a minute.

If I went to work Monday morning at an assembly plant and took a knee in protest at my machine center or press, my employment would be in jeopardy.

If the shift leader was passing out assignments in the morning and I took a knee? And demanded my “right” to do so?

If an attorney took a knee in front of a judge to protest the judicial system? Or even worse if I am a defendant and when the bailiff calls for all or rise for the Honorable so and so. If I took a knee to protest the treatment of my race in the legal system?

When a player is suited up and on the field, he is at work. He is on somebody else’s clock, being paid to perform his job. Calling my employer a slave owner Is not going to help my future contracts. And is just an attempt to gain support for my actions by making it racist. Kaepernick is untouchable not because of his trip to South America complaining about America or his press conference wearing a “Che” shirt complaining about oppression. He is untouchable because no one wants to hire an employee that makes them look bad. The call for “letting Kaep play, he has a right to further his career” forget that they are not demanding a team let him play, but that a team pay him to play. If Kaep was going to play for free, many teams would let him play.

Now, let’s emphasis the athlete in the job description.

These players are high profile athletes. Many if not most have charities and causes the promote and raise money for. Peyton Manning has a lot of children’s charities that he fronts. Richard Sherman, Eli Manning, Andrew Luck, etc. have done many good and wonderful works for people and causes. They don’t do it on the field.  

A professional athlete today has a media footprint that is huge compared to the athletes of just a few years ago. Press conferences, interviews, press statements, and a giant social media presence.

That’s where you make your protests.

That’s  where you make your societal statements. And advocate for your cause.

if your doing it on national broadcasts, on your employers time, in order to raise the profile and get more coverage then I would suspect it is more about you and your marketing brand and less about your issue.

 

Psychological tactics for avoiding accountability

From the good folks at wattsupwiththat.com

Ten Psychological Tactics for Avoiding Climate Science Accountability

According to the article, here are the “tactical tricks”:

Delegate the matter to someone else internally – diffuse it, distance yourself from it – and do everything to avoid an internal and especially an independent review.

Avoid, reword, or repackage, the issues – obfuscate the facts, or at least talk tentatively or vaguely about some mistakes in the past and that you or someone could probably have done a better job on … but go no further; rationalise and/or disguise any culpability.

Focus on minor or “other” things so as to look like you are focusing on the central things, punctuating it all with the language of transparency and accountability.

Appeal to your integrity and to acting with the highest standards, without demonstrating either.

Point out your past track record. Highlight anything positive that you are doing or contributing to now.

Ask and assume that people should trust you without verification. Offer some general assurances that you have or will be looking into the matter and all is okay.

State that you are under attack or at least that you are not being treated fairly or that people just don’t understand.

Mention other peoples’ (alleged) problems, question their motives and credibility; dress someone else in your own dirty clothes, especially if they are noisome question-askers or whistleblowers.

Prop up the old boys’ leadership club, reshuffle the leadership deck if necessary yet without changing leaders or their power or how they can cover for each other in the name of “loyalty” and on behalf of the “greater good”. Try to hold out until the dust settles and the “uncomfortable” stuff hopefully goes away.

So in short, don’t really do anything with real transparency and accountability; rather, maintain your self-interests, lifestyle, affiliations, and allusions of moral congruity, even if it means recalibrating your conscience – essentially, acting corruptly via complicity, cover-ups, and cowardice.

I see so much of this in today’s headlines. Not just in climate change arguments but in nearly every political commentary.

its like politicians studied it years ago.